Hard drives

I use to always buy Maxtor heard drives. They seem to be the most reliable back in the days of my G4. I also had the misfortune of owning a DeathStar by IBM. I'm keen to buy a 2TB drive and wanted some opinions on vendors. Seagate bough tout Maxtor, did they retain the quality or ??? They were always so-so in my mind. Western Digital has some interesting eco drives which seem interesting.. though not so good for RAID I heard and failure rate was high. Actually, it seems that most drives I looked at reviewers would say either worked perfect or DOA. Is it that we have reached such sizes and speed that the failure rate is so high? I'm hoping to have have 2TB mirrored to be on the safe side. How about Samsung? Last question, many drives are eSATA. I've come across a gadget that converted eSATA to Firewire but the cost was too high. Any low cost gadgets? I'd like to get an external case that holds 2 drives that isn't super noisy yet doesn't cost $$$$$ either.

In all the reviews I've looked at when I need to buy drives, Seagate on average stood above everybody. I've never had a problem them either. I've had multiple Western Digital failures, and a Maxtor, but not in any of my many-year old Seagates, yet.

Either way, you still have to plan for them dying and the prices for similar drives are roughly the same, so I'd say find one that offers the performance level you want that you feel comfortable and go with it.

I had 3 Maxtor drives fail on me in about the last 7 years. One of them was improperly mounted, so maybe it doesn't count... but I definitely haven't had good luck with them. Generally, I've mostly had good luck with seagates, but I had two fail, including one that was less than 6 months old. That one seagate replaced under warranty, so that was nice.

I've never had any trouble with Western Digital drives. I currently have two Western Digital drives and a Samsung (which was supplied by Apple) in my Mac Pro, and have no complaints. At work we bought a big pile of Western Digital drives a while back for a project (about 40, I think), and had no DOAs and no failures yet.
Most of the drives failures I have had have been caused by some sort of impact (like the ones someone put in their hold baggage on a plane. One of them squeaked afterwards when you picked it up!), but I've had one or two random failures with Maxtor drives. But then any drive will eventually fail when it gets old.

AndyKorth Wrote:That one seagate replaced under warranty, so that was nice.

That reminded me... The same happened to me.

But something freaky happened with the RAID I created. I bought a couple drives for my Mac Pro, tried to RAID two of them, had to break the RAID for something and then the drive was useless. No amount of reformatting and disk tools worked on it, so I just sent it in and they gave me a new one.